Dear Alixia
by cojack
Summary: C/7. Seven and Chakotay's daughter writes letters to her PADD-pal on New Talaxia. Set in the universe described in "That Good Night". Fluff? You betcha. I wanted to highlight some things we gloss over in the Star Trek universe.
1. Chapter 1

DISCLAIMER: It's Paramount's galaxy.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: C/7. Seven and Chakotay's daughter writes letters to her PADD-pal on New Talaxia. Set in the universe described in "That Good Night". Fluff? You betcha. I wanted to highlight some things we gloss over in the Star Trek universe.

Not sure if anyone will find these humorous or not, but here goes. We'll start out with two letters about the similarity between species and the universal translator and see what you think.

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DEAR ALIXIA

Stardate 65115.8

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Dear Ali-X-ia,

We're back orbiting Earth for a short visit. Mama and Papa went on a date tonight, so Mezoti came up from school and was left in charge. I asked Mezoti why there are so many humanoid species in the Galaxy, but I don't think she knows because she told me not to bother her. I think Earther features are the most boring. We don't have any bumps or ridges or antenna. I told Mezoti I wanted an implant over my eye like her and Mama. She got angry at me for some reason. She gets all serious and tries to talk like Mama when she's scolding me.

Anyway, it's true about Earthers. My best friend on the Sacagawea is part Klingon, and they have all these interesting ridges and bumps on their forehead. My sisters and brother are the same way! Mezoti is Norcadian, and they have a bump between their eyes. Jaxa is from Bajor, and has some ridges between her eyes. Icheb is from Brunali, and he has a ridge on his forehead. Not big like Klingons, but kind of long and thin.

Did you know Icheb and Jaxa are married? Jaxa gave me an earring the last time I saw her. I like to wear it all the time. It has silver loops with turquoise stones. Turquoise is blue. Have you ever seen an Andorian? There's one on our ship. He doesn't have any bumps or ridges, but he has these antennas on his head. Andorians are also blue.

I heard someone once say I look like Papa, so I thought I might draw a tattoo on my face like he has. His is all one color and is of an eagle claw or something. It's kind of plain so I decided to make mine colorful. I have a set of markers, and made some flowers. I ran out of room on my temple, so I extended a little onto my cheek.

Mezoti was REALLY unhappy. Mama and Papa smiled, but made me wash my tattoo off. Papa said when I'm older, perhaps I could get a real tattoo like him.

Is Brax still mad at you about the plomeek soup incident? Write back soon.

Your friend in the alpha quadrant,

I-X-chell

P.S. Green, grid 13-3.

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65115.8

… awaiting Alixia's response …

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Dear Alixia,

I asked Mama to make some leola root stew like you said and she gave me a funny look. Your Dad must be wrong because I don't think they like it.

I was wondering how the UT knows how to translate words a certain way when they are real close. Like Papa and Dad or Daddy. I wonder how those are translated in Talaxian. When you write about your Papa it translates to Dad, but how do we know it's getting it right? When I talk to Ensign Chiin (he's the Andorian here on the Sacagawea), am I really speaking in Andorian to his ears? I wonder how I sound. He told me once my voice was like his daughter's, but isn't that just the UT speaking in his ears?

And the UT doesn't translate everything. My aunt sometimes teaches me Klingon words, but why doesn't the UT translate them in my ears? I hear them in Klingonese. It's all so mysterious and confusing. I asked Papa about it, and he didn't know anything. Mama started trying to explain it, but I didn't understand. I guess I'm like Papa.

I asked the computer to let me hear Talaxian spoken without the UT, and it doesn't sound anything like my Earth language. Shouldn't I be able to tell if someone was speaking a different language by how their lips move compared to what I hear? I can't tell with Ensign Chiin. He says he's speaking in Andorian.

We should develop our own language so if the UT fails we can still talk to each other. Or I suppose I could learn Talaxian. Is that hard?

Aloha,

Ixchell

P.S. Aloha means hello **_and_** goodbye in an Earth language. Write what you get in Talaxian back to me and let's see what the UT does. Oh, and Red, grid 5-7.

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65141.2

… awaiting Alixia's response …


	2. Chapter 2

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The next chapter of "Recharting the Course" is coming along slowly, but I did "find" two more letters about techno-babble, transporters, star dates and other fluff, I mean, stuff. It's hard to write this from a 7 1/2 year old's perspective, but fortunately, Chakotay and Seven's daughter _is_ very precocious.

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Dear Alixia,

Do you have transporters on New Talaxia? We do. To tell you the truth, I'm still a little creeped out about using the transporter. It feels like my skin is still tingling long after I rematerialize and I worry if everything was put back together correctly. I held my eyes open during my last transport and I could still see my hands the whole time. How is that possible and how can we keep seeing and thinking while in the transporter beam if we've been converted to energy and are in a transporter buffer or stream or whatever?

Mama says for Earth it was in the early 22nd century when Dr. Emory Erickson devised a way to construct a sub-diffraction limited imaging array that could lock onto femptometer sized targets through a spatial variant while employing a Heisenberg uncertainty compensator and channel the excess matter-energy conversion through subspace manifolds to avoid matter hyper-disassociation in our space-time continuum (that last part sounds scary). I think she was trying to make me feel better when I didn't want to go on the transporter. I asked her later to repeat it so I could get a recording and write it down to send you. I don't know what it all means, but I guess it makes me feel better to know that Mama does. I'm a little nervous to ask Mama another question about it because she might think I'm interested in quantum chromodynamics (whatever that is! I overheard Mezoti and Mama talking about it the other day during their weekly subspace comm link and wanted to include it in your letter also).

Anyway, I can't believe the news that Brax is going to StarfleetAcademy on Earth. He'll be the first Talaxian to attend. It seems like everyone goes to StarfleetAcademy, but I've been there and it doesn't seem big enough. Might you come to the alpha quadrant when he's dropped off? Icheb and Jaxa both just got promoted and are staying on the _Stockholm_ for another tour. They recently had a baby and named her after Admiral Janeway, so I'm now an aunt! Kathryn, but they call her Katie. I haven't met her yet, but they did send us some holoimages. She's so cute!

BFFAB,

Ixchell

P.S. That was a good move. When I showed Mama our game, she said you used the classic Bushall-Savick gambit and wondered if your Dad is giving you lessons. I looked it up and Bushall and Savick were both Kadis-kot grand masters a long time ago, even before Mama and Papa were our age. Do you want to start another?

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65188.9

… awaiting Alixia's response …

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Dear Alixia,

I found out today that not everyone on Earth uses stardates. Right now, on Earth, it's March 14, 2388. Well, not all of Earth, but at least in a place called Greenwich. I'm not exactly sure if everyone on Earth uses the same calendar, but I do know that it's really only Starfleet that uses stardates.

March is a month. It's named after Mars, which is another planet in Earth's solar system. Actually, the planet and month are both named after the Roman god of war. In Rome long ago, they worshiped a bunch of gods, at least that's what the Federation database said, and some of the months are named after those gods. There are twelve months in a year, and each lasts 30 or 31 Earth days, the time of the Earth's moon's orbit. Actually, February has only 28 days in it, most of the time anyway. By the way, you'll never guess what the Earth's moon is called. I'll tell you at the end of this letter. 14 is the day of the month, and 2388 is the number of Earth years since someone named Jesus of Nazareth was born on Earth. Actually, not exactly, since the person who first made the calculation made a mistake. It was actually a few years earlier.

So, almost sixty years ago, Starfleet started using stardates that count off 1000 SD basetime units every Earth year. For some reason they started at zero on January 1, 2323 (January 1st marks the beginning of an Earth year, so I don't think that's anyone special's birthday, but I might be wrong). They also had stardates before that, but it was all mixed up. I saw a report Icheb gave while _Voyager_ was in the delta quadrant about a captain named James T. Kirk, and the stardates jumped around all over the place, sometimes going backwards! There's a complicated formula that depends not only on the time but on your location and how fast you're traveling and how close you are to a star or planet. Time passes differently depending on those things. How could anyone meet up for a date or to go out to eat with such a confusing system? Fortunately they abandoned the original stardate system in the early 24th century and now just constantly reset a star ship's clocks when needed to always match something called Galactocentric inertial Earth time (GIET).

Anyway, I was born on Earth on October 1, 2380. October just means "8th month", although it's really the 10th month of the year. Years used to begin in March.

I guess that's still kind of confusing. It's good the computer knows what date it is so we don't forget. How do you keep dates and times on New Talaxia?

Ta,

Ixchell

PS. Earth's moon is called… Moon. Isn't that silly? Red, grid 10-8

PPS. Do you like The Adventures of Flotter? They just came out with a new holoprogram!

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65201.5

… awaiting Alixia's response …


	3. Chapter 3

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Again, the next chapter of "Recharting the Course" is coming along slowly. Watching the new "Cosmos" this past weekend got me thinking of very large numbers, and interestingly enough, Ixchell was thinking along the same lines in her second letter below. I think I prefer the original "Cosmos," but of course it's hard to say after only one episode.

Dear Alixia,

Tell me about it! Both Papa and Mama claim they didn't even know about Flotter and Trevis when they were kids, and Mama just doesn't understand. She gave me a whole lesson on the difference between evolution and metamorphosis when I mentioned how Trevis' friends evolve from buds to their different forms. Then, when she overheard Miral and I chatting about what they look like and their magical bud-powers, she lectured us on how magic wasn't real and spent ten minutes trying to get us interested in conducting a science experiment in the galley. Now she wants me to start memorizing stuff about real plants, animals and other organisms from the various planets we're visiting instead.

When it comes to The Adventures, why can't they be more like my friend Miral's parents? They just laugh when we gush about Flotter and Trevis. Aunt B'Elanna said that Trevis didn't have his buds when she was a little girl. Imagine that. Uncle Tom helped us establish a comm with Deep Space Three when the new adventure was released, and that was in the middle of the night ship time. Sometimes he even joins us on the holodeck to play along, and it seems like he has as much fun as we do. So, Papa and Mama talked about it and I can still play my programs on the holodeck. I'm going to have to learn something new about each planet we visit though.

To answer your question, I have collected nearly all of them. I particularly like Juniperfir.

I'll write you a longer letter soon.

Yours sincerely,

Ixchell

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65215.9

… awaiting Alixia's response …

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Dear Alixia,

I did forget to make a move in my last letter. I'll make it first so I don't forget this time. Red, grid 2-3.

Here's a fun fact I learned when visiting a planet the other day. There are more cells in our body than stars in the Galaxy. About 42 trillion as compared to 400 billion. That's like 100 galaxies of cells inside each of us right now!

On that planet, there are huge amoeba-like creatures that flowed about on the surface and they had 100 times more cells than me. When they moved, they would cover plants and digested stuff through their skin. It was like watching lava, although the slime-creatures (that's what I started calling them) were more a purple color than red. Mama tried to determine if they were sentient, but it seemed clear to me they were not. I helped her analyze the data. She got real excited when we discovered the essential amino acids they need are totally different than the ones we need. Everything on the planet was the same way, so we wouldn't be able to survive on the planet eating the same things the slime-creatures eat. Something like that anyway.

Its amazing Earthers and Talaxians and Klingons and Andorians and Bolians and Romulans and everyone else are so much alike that we can eat the same things. For some of the meals here on the _Sacagawea_, sometimes I wish we couldn't eat the same thing. I just don't like Klingon food _at all_, and Andorian food is always so cold. I wonder if there are some amino acids in leola root that don't agree with Earthers. I think we're so much alike because the Progenitors seeded all those planets so long ago, Earth and Talax included I guess.

The planet we visited was an unexpected discovery and everyone aboard was quite excited about it. The _Sacagawea_ is surveying a globular cluster just outside the disk of the Galaxy (nowhere near the Delta quadrant, by the way). It's weird looking out and seeing half the sky nearly totally black; just a few faint stars and distant smudges that are other galaxies in one direction, and the whole disk of the Milky Way with so many stars in the other. Anyway, there aren't many M class planets in the cluster. Miral says it's because the stars are squished together and it messes up the orbits of planets in the habitable zones.

If there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, that would make 40 trillion billion stars, or 40 sextillion. That's 4 with 22 zeros! 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000! Papa mentioned the possibility of many universes existing in a greater multiverse. Imagine that! How many stars might that be?

With 10 billion people on Earth now, that's 400 sextillion cells. With all the different planets and species in the Federation, that's like a multiverse of cells! Isn't it wonderful that New Talaxia is a full member of the Federation now? Somehow that and how we can eat the same food makes me feel a little closer.

Love,

Ixchell

… translating to Talaxian …transmitting…65222.2

… awaiting Alixia's response …


End file.
